The View From Here

We try to make room for what’s important to us. We cut back overtime for hiking time or scroll time for writing time. I did the same. I made room to be there for my children by resigning a high pressure job. So now I do dishes on my lunch break and am there in the afternoons when their keys slip into the front door lock. I drive them to their activities and remember to water the plants in the morning.

Am I less busy? Not entirely. I just thought there would be time now. Time for clearing my head when the everyday was too much. The truth is I’ve cleared away a pit in wet sand, only to have more slosh into the void. There are tinier things admixed into my life now, like the constant pursuit of learning to do my job right, the body aches of a newly sedentary life, and a new professional society leadership position.

In an old journal entry, I said I wanted to stop thinking so much. It’s unsettling to remember how much I pushed myself and how I can’t recapture even a morsel of that motivation now. It’s gone. Part of me believes it died so that some new ambition could be born. I simply waiting but haven’t harnessed that new self yet. Truly a pregnant pause.

I’m hoping to be more intentional about my time and incorporate the balance I didn’t have before. Last year, I showed up for others and myself, but I have to continue the initiative in a new way with physical health. No triathlons are in my future, but it’s possible.

“Time Enough At Last” premiered on the Twilight Zone in 1956 and starred Bergess Meredith. It’s one of my favorite episodes since it’s not supernatural, but a human story. We are always stealing moments and squeezing our pleasure in between the margins of over-encumbered lives. Making changes in 2025 was my attempt to stop living in the margin, but I need to go further. I have to keep going.

I’ve dashed away the idea of reading every book I buy. Every avid reader knows the struggle of overfilling the to-be-read list and slowly letting it trickle out with the completed titles. I’m still working on reading stamina for paperbacks but prefer audiobooks, which has helped accelaerate my yearly read book count in the last three years. It’s just easier to clean the kitchen while I listen. Occasionally, I do have to switch to the paperback version if I can’t get audio or simply don’t like the performance (sorry Unkindness of Ghosts).

Thinking of it as a collection (and getting an app1 to organize it) makes me scour bookshop.org or mahoganybooks.com for the next gem with confidence. Sometimes we harbor guilt over supposed needless expense, but what is the point of life if not discovering the new worlds others pull us into? So I’m doing that, curating, running my hands over crisp covers and unmarred pages, bridging what’s not on audio, and appreciating the piles forming.

Here’s some of my newest buys and among what will be the first reads of the year:

This is the seventh book in the Easy Rawlins series that began with Devil in a Blue Dress. Easy has grown from a young and reckless man to someone older, unafraid, but likely as reckless as ever. He has a thirst for the chase in a case.

Social media occasionally delivers some value and snippets of Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry was it. I didn’t know where to start, so I chose at random. When it’s dark and quiet after all the revelry of the holidays, I may sit down with this book.

This was on backorder for a while and represents the haunting echo of an ongoing, murderous occupation crushing without mercy. They murder dancers, doctors, journalists, and people like Refaat, a poet. His book is an indelible legacy, as all physical media is, so the collection is a testament that he was here. Everything we write that survives is confirmation that we were here.

I devoured 60 books in 2025, the most I’ve ever completed in my life. I even reread four of them! I’m mainly a horror girlie but will make the occasional detour for professional books or nonfiction. I completed Bad Boy Brawly Brown by Walter Mosley two hours before midnight on New Year’s Eve.

I was going to tell you, faves only, about the books I read this year but then I saw this by Austin Kleon :

I’ve been fortunate to dislike very few books I’ve picked up. Here is the trash: